So this Priest Walks into a Sukkah

As I referenced last week, our parish beer club has been working on expanding our interfaith horizons by brewing with the beer club from Congregation Rodeph Shalom.

 

 

Our brewing efforts resulted in a beer we dubbed, “Ecclesiastes 3:1- To Everything There’s a Saison.”  We debut it earlier this week as part of Rodeph Shalom’s Sukkot celebrations.

Sukkot is the Jewish harvest festival and closes out the High Holy Days.  The holiday, also known as the Festival of Booths, has its origins in Israel’s agricultural past.  At harvest time people would have to leave their cities and live in the fields in order to bring in the crop.   This experience is recreated through creating a sukkah (a tent/booth) outside the synagogue.

Anyway, about ten people from our parish/beer club, headed over to RS’s parking lot where we joined about 30 folks from the congregation for a festive dinner and of course, our beer.

Before we sat down to eat Rabbi Eli Freedman and president of the synagogue invited me to join them at the front of the sukkah as they explained the history and importance of the holiday and lead us all in prayers of thanksgiving and a blessing over the beer.

By nature I love learning about other people and their traditions.  As a Christian I find it doubly meaningful to learn about the faith and practices that inspired Jesus.

It was a great pleasure to share these traditions as well as some excellent food and fellowship.  It all made for a night that I will not soon forget.  And to think that it all began over a brew kettle.

Our sincere thanks to Rabbi Eli, Matthew, Lee and the rest of Congregation Rodeph Shalom for their hospitality!

Interfaith Brewing

Brewing, like most creative acts, can be an enormously satisfying experience.  Moreover, brewing, like playing music, gets a lot more fun when you are not doing it alone.  Many times I have whiled away an afternoon hanging out with friends from our parish beer club, shooting the breeze, catching up on news, listening to the game on the radio and reveling in the wonderful aroma of malt tea and hops.

Then in August we decided to deepen this already meaningful experience when we did a collaboration brew with our friends from Congregation Rodeph Shalom Synagogue.  Rabbi Eli Freedman and I have known each other for about a year and a half and have been working together since we started doing our “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Minister Walk Into a Bar” events.

We were first brought together by Nancy and George Hummel of Homesweet Homebrew who knew that we both had beer clubs at our congregations.  Getting our respective clubs together was a logical next step.  And so with a little planning a nice respective cross section of each of our groups gathered in my church basement where we have a big industrial kitchen.

We left the actual work of brewing and monitoring temperature and time to our more experienced lead brewers.  In the meantime we spent our time mingling with the people (we are clergy after all) and getting to know the members of the other group.

To me the highlight of the day was taking the members from Rodeph Shalom on a tour of our church.  It is always a unique and enjoyable experience to explain symbolism and structure to folks from another faith.  It was even better when Eli and his people were able to seize onto common symbols and explain how they had their origins in Judaism.

By the time we wrapped up the tour the brew crew in the kitchen was already chilling the wort.  As to the beer itself, we brewed a Saison (Belgian farmhouse) style beer.  The day wrapped up with us collectively trying to figure out a name that would have some significance for both of our faiths.  We settled on “Ecclesiastes 3:1 (To everything there’s a Saison).”  This is of course terrible pun but we couldn’t help ourselves.

We look forward to serving the beer for the first time at one of Rodeph Shalom’s Sukkot celebrations at a festival dinner for both of our clubs out under their big sukkah (tent).  FYI, Sukkot is the Jewish harvest festival and to honor its agricultural origins, traditionally takes place out under a big tent.

So while making this beer was a lot of fun, its real value will not be in drinking it, but in the bonds it help to forge between a group of people from different faiths.  In the end we discovered we have much more in common than just the love of great beer and that is something always worthy of celebration.

I look forward to sharing details and pictures from the event with you soon.

Where haven’t I been?

For those of you who are still bothering to read my blog, let me first offer a word of thanks.  As of today, I will be returning to my usual weekly posts.

By way of explanation this summer has been a whirlwind of travel closely followed by frantic bouts of trying to catch up with work.  I realize that the “I’ve been too busy” excuse is about as credible as telling your teacher that the dog ate your homework.  We’re all busy.

In any case, as I did in my last post, I will be detailing many of these adventures in beer, travel and hospitality in the weeks to come.  But just to give you a thumbnail here are some of the highlights.

My parish celebrated fourth of July with amazing pulled pork from Tom Bera of Blind Pig and washed it down with 2 different sixtels of homebrew.

I ate roast lamb (including a lamb based gelatinous dessert that tasted like lamb, honey, cinnamon and soap)  in Albania washed down with a beer called Stela (meant to be confused with but definitely not Stella Artois).

Amid the glory of Rome I sampled an amazing variety of beers, made friends with an Irish ex-pat who runs one of the best bottle shop in the whole country and ran into friend and fellow beer lover Fergus Carey.

I made my first pilgrimage to Hill Farmstead in northern Vermont for a special limited edition bottle release of The Genealogy of Mortals and Phenomenology of Spirit (two awesomely named beers).  I also filled three growlers with some of the best IPA’s I have ever tasted.

From there it revisiting our collaboration with Rabbi Eli Freedman as his congregation joined with mine to brew a very special interfaith Saison we are calling “Ecclesiastes 3:1.  To everything there’s a Saison.” But building the bonds of fellowship over a brew kettle is just the beginning.  We plan to deepen those bonds of common faith when we debut this beer at Congregation Rodeph Shalom’s Sukkot celebration later this month.

Later in August I shared beer with fellow pub theologians Bryan Bergheoff and Michael Camp while standing in ankle deep mud at the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, NC.

No sooner did I return from that trip then it was off to DC where I got the band back together with Bryan and Rabbi Eli to reprise our “A Rabbi, a Priest and a Minster walk into a bar” gig at a sold out Dr. Granville Moore’s.

I wrapped up my summer travel with a trip to Adamstown, PA for flea marketing and a visit to Stoudt’s Brewery.  Carol and Ed Stoudt not only turn out excellent beers but also offer a top notch restaurant and world class hospitality.

So that is how the dog ate my homework, I mean, why I haven’t been blogging much this summer.  I promise to do better and maybe even squeeze in an extra credit assignment or two.